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Eidetic memory is the ability to recollect an image so vividly that it appears to be real. For the most part it is found only in children. Eidetic ability fades with age--one investigator guessed that fewer than one in a thousand of the children who had it, kept it into adulthood. Most eidetikers can't summon the eidetic image once it fades from mind, either. But there are exceptions.

Some observers thought the testees were faking it, or at least not exhibiting anything out of the ordinary. Then someone hit on the ingenious notion of decomposing an illustration into two images, each consisting of an apparently meaningless set of lines or dots. One image would be presented for inspection, then taken away and after a few seconds replaced by the other. Those who truly had the gift could combine the two images into the original illustration--objective evidence, it would seem, that eidetic memory really exists.

Here's a little information about that one-in-a-thousand person who held onto her eidetic memory into adulthood. In 1970 Psychology Today reported on Elizabeth, a Harvard instructor. Using her right eye, she looked for several minutes at a 100 x 100 grid of apparently random dots--10,000 dots in all. The next day, using her left eye, she looked at a second grid of 100 x 100 dots. She then mentally merged this grid with the remembered one into a 3-D image that most people needed a stereoscopic viewer and both grids to see. Reportedly she could recall eidetic images of a million dots for as much as four hours.